What (M)Other Can I Be?

My daughters trap me in a womanly furrow. Their infancies so lovely, when they're all suck and ravenous touch, tiny scraps of flesh clinging like carnivorous flowers, so helpless and entirely mine—How sad that they grow and turn their thoughts into secrets, they have sorrows they no longer tell me. Sometimes they're so far away, I feel afraid. What will I do then? I am still young. Where my husband is weak, I will be all endurance, my children shall look up and see a mountain. And yet he calls me soft and spoilt, he mocks my small hands. It is not just of him. And I am silent, I say nothing, to say the truth would kill him, is that not right? And I am strong enough. What other can I be?

—Alison Croggon, Navigatio

Being a woman poet in Australia has always been an exercise in both encountering and countering male-dominated spaces that have been marked out in set boundaries, centers, and peripheries. In fact, issues of spatiality—places, maps, sites, landscapes—catalyze a discourse embedded in much of the critical discussion of women poets. In the article "The Rise of Women's Poetry in the 1970s," for example, Ann Vickery paraphrases Patricia Dobrez when she writes that "as with the pub scene, the small press scene was primarily a site of male homosociality and a means to validate certain forms of bonding and self-definition" (265, citing Dobrez). In this example, the space allowed for women poets' voices is given the prescribed room of the "pub," long a site for male bonding and fighting—the kitchen table, perhaps, of patriarchy. Vickery goes on to use further images of spatiality by saying:

The little magazines provided an ambivalent space for women to be published, a space which enabled visibility at the same time as it mapped out a still small set of positions available for women in the poetic field. Poets like Dorothy Porter and Gig Ryan, who both entered the poetic field later in the 1970s, recall feeling frustrated at finding the intellectual conversation being carried out by men while the poetry scene was segregated in such a way that women were not part of that conversation.

(269)

Women's voices and agency are discussed here in geographic terms—space, maps, positions in the field. Site is profoundly linked to the ability to participate in a literary conversation and be acknowledged. With regard to taking part in the production of little magazines (and the network that formed around it), women were often either marginal or rendered invisible in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The watershed in the publication (and validation?) of women's poetry arguably came at the production of the first anthology of women's poetry published in Australia, Mother, I'm Rooted, edited by the twenty-six-year-old Sydney University graduate Kate Jennings in 1975. We see again spatial metaphors in Vickery's discussion of this groundbreaking anthology:

It is important that Jennings herself became skeptical about the anthology's value in the late 1980s. For her, women-only anthologies were like "playing […] in a different sandbox […] [T]he ascendancy of men remains unchallenged." … As Jennings saw it, an anthology of women's poetry provided a smaller and separate sandbox from the boys, where throwing sand at the boys and generally calling attention to herself and her friends was bad manners rather than effective. Her imagery of the child's sandbox neatly sets up a notion of the poetic field as enclosed territory where games such as "who's the king of the castle?" are played out.

(279, quoting Jennings 77)

In The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, we read that earlier, in the 1960s, when Gwen Harwood was beginning her poetry career,

low esteem, augmented by the soaring reputation of male peers, was difficult to overcome, as was the realisation, according to [Amy] Witting, that proven intellectual capacity in a female was about as appealing as facial hair to the opposite sex. Also, well into the 1960s literary circles, no less than public bars, were men...